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Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

Metrics in an Agile World

Summary

James Shore and Rob Myers help you examine the role of metrics on Agile teams. We take a broad survey of metrics being used on Agile projects, both traditional and innovative, and look at the value and dangers to the success of the team. We look at how the simple act of measuring, itself, can be harmful, and when it is well-justified.

Bio

Rob Myers is lead instructor and co-founder of Agile Institute. Rob has been training and coaching teams in Agile practices and object-oriented programming since 1999.
James Shore is an XP/Agile consultant and practitioner who has been leading agile teams in success and failure since 1999.

About the conference

Agile 2009 is an exciting international industry conference that presents the latest techniques, technologies, attitudes and first-hand experience, from both a management and development perspective, for successful Agile software development.

Community comments

Re: Metrics in an Agile World

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If there was a point I didn’t get it! The evil side of metrics is neither new nor specific to software development. For instance, measuring students’ performance through exams can make some of them study towards assessment not learning. Does that mean schools should stop trying to measure student’s performance?

The title led me to believe that the presentation is about the metrics that fit well in agile mindset and how to use them. Did I expect too much?

Re: Metrics in an Agile World

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You did not expect too much, and I think it's a fair criticism that we didn't spend as much time on the possible solutions to the metrics dysfunctions as we would have liked. Jim summarized the approach nicely, but we would have enjoyed examining many of the metrics that the audience brought up, and looking for ways to find alternatives, or to use the "measure up" approach to mitigate dysfunction.

Moving performance metrics up to the level where individuals (or the teams measured) cannot directly alter the measure is the basic approach. Anonymous reporting, and aggregating the values, prevents that dysfunction, and turns a motivational metric into informational. It can still be used to measure performance, but it's at a higher level, and resembles something that we would really prefer to optimize, rather than setting up an opportunity for local optimization (gaming the system).

We're still exploring these techniques, and I'm hoping to shift the balance of the talk from so many examples of dysfunction into examples of practical techniques to remove the dysfunction.